The Inheritance Trilogy

by N. K. Jemisin

  She smiled in a lopsided way. “Take care of him? I want nothing of the sort. I’d be a fool not to recognize the strength in him, Shill; that’s precisely why I want him. Call me selfish for it, but I want daughters—and sons, too—with his spirit. It’s as simple as that.”

  I started to get mad again; Zhakkarn squeezed my shoulder, gently. “Well, maybe you should ask him to give you some spirit and babies, then!”

  She blinked, then laughed. “You have such an odd way of phrasing things.” She sighed. “I will be—careful with him. I’m no brute; I want a helpmeet, not just some stud-beast to be chained away between uses. But, Shill… I did ask him to marry me. And Lumyn asked him. He hasn’t answered either of us… which is why Fahno is forcing the issue.”

  “Oh!” Why hadn’t Eino answered her? I would have to ask him. I was beginning to think that understanding this whole mess might be the key to understanding him. And myself.

  I had grown, though, and I understood now how important good manners were. “Thank you,” I said. “You made me bigger. I’ll, um, I’ll go think about what you said.” Then I shifted from foot to foot, but I was too grown up now not to acknowledge when I’d been wrong. “And I, uh, I’m sorry I was mean to you.”

  She smiled cheerfully. “That’s fine. I got to watch Lady Zhakkarn beat you senseless, after all. Let’s call it even.”

  I was surprised into a laugh, though it was not a very good laugh. (Suddenly I understood why so many mortals laughed without really meaning it.) “Um, I’m gonna go find Eino and talk to him now. Bye.”

  She nodded, as did Zhakkarn. “Until later, Lady Shill.”

  I will stop here to tell you another thing you should know. That day with Mikna was when I realized that it is not their poison that makes enulai powerful. Also, I started to know that having power does not make a person—or a god—better, or right. I did not dislike Mikna anymore, and I probably would even like Lumyn if I gave her a chance… but I thought they were both wrong about a lot of things.

  Yes yes OK I know you knew that already you do not have to be obnoxious about it OK.

  So I went back to Fahno’s house, not bothering with a body as I moved through it. Lumyn was gone. Fahno was in her study, and the whole room felt of weary frustration; I did not invade her privacy. The servants were just going about their business as usual. Arolu was in a pretty room with a glass skylight where there were comfortable seats and flowers and books and lengths of cloth and thread on skeins. At first I thought he was working on a small embroidered blanket with a hood and little feet, which was in his lap. But he just sat there, unmoving, and after a moment I realized he had something else in his lap: a small ceramic circle which bore a portrait of a woman’s face. I could see her resemblance to Eino in the strength of her jaw and the determination in her gaze. Tehno, Eino’s mother, and Arolu’s lost wife.

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. I was confused, because he could not see me; how did he know I was there? But then he touched the circle, and I realized he wasn’t talking to me. I wondered what he was sorry about. Whether he’d gone through this at some point, being given to a woman he maybe didn’t love, made to stuff himself into floofy clothes and quiet rooms when maybe he was the kind of man who wanted to run and shout. Somewhere along the way he had grown to love Tehno, obviously, but when? How? Had it been worth it?

  I was a big girl now; I didn’t bother him.

  Eino was up on the roof, lounging beneath the canopy of the chair I’d first seen Fahno in. A whole day had passed since that moment; it made me feel nostalgic for how young and silly I’d been back then. He didn’t sit like Fahno, though, who liked to be forward-leaning and intent; instead Eino sat sprawled in the chair, his legs crossed, his arms draped over the rests, an expression of distant boredom in his face. But his face was another kind of lie; mortals did that a lot, I was beginning to see. He was not bored, he was brooding. Angry, with perfect grace. I shaped myself out of ether and settled on the ground beside his chair; he did not seem at all surprised when I did.

  “The word is out, Shill,” he said quietly. “Everyone in town is talking about me. How I somehow got the Council to discuss male property inheritance. How I lured a group of innocent, good-hearted boys to Yukur for unnatural revels in the middle of the night. How I’m the reason a boy ran away to Menchey rather than marry the woman his clan had chosen for him. How I’ve been seen talking to men in the sharing houses, and foreigners. How I’ve been gathering an army, and soon it will be the Men’s Rebellion all over again.”

  I leaned against his chair. “What’s a sharing house?”

  “Where men go when they have no clan to care for them, and when they are not so homely that they are completely without value. They get meals and a bed to sleep in, provided they share it with any woman who wants them.” He smiled thinly. “Father fears I’ll end up in one, at the rate I’m going. I’m beginning to think I might not mind.”

  I frowned. Sharing houses did not sound very nice. “Is any of that other stuff true, about you?”

  “Does it matter? Home and tradition are threatened. Everywhere, young men of previously honorable character are acting out. Someone must be to blame.”

  He sounded sad, too, underneath the mad. Maybe I should not have left, while Lumyn and Fahno and Mikna were still arguing. As I watched him, Eino reached into one of his sleeves and took out something small. I heard the echo of Lumyn’s voice and realized it was the thing she’d given him. A small box. He opened it, tilting it so I could see: inside was a very curvy knife. A beautiful knife, its handle wrapped in shiny white stuff and its sharp blade inlaid with small plates of black stone and red-and-green lacquer, done up in patterns like forest vines. I oohed. “I like that knife!”

  “Do you?” Eino was smiling again, but it was still mad and sad and bitter. “I do, too, in spite of myself. Such a pretty threat.”

  “Huh?”

  He turned the knife over, setting his thumb against its edge. “Not how she sees it, of course. Lumyn is Darre through and through, whatever anyone else thinks. Of course she would give me a circumcision knife, and think it a romantic gesture; that’s how most Darre think of it, after all. It’s how I thought of it, really, until I thought, and realized just how grotesque the whole custom is.”

  I knew the word because Papa Tempa had taught it to me. But—“She wants to cut you?”

  “Of course. It’s how marriage goes, for Darre. A woman takes a man to her home, and there in solemn, intimate ceremony…” He shrugged. He’d cut his finger. A fat drop of blood welled up as I watched; I cringed away inwardly even as I stayed still and stared, hypnotized. Demon blood. “I suppose I should be glad these aren’t ancient times, when women would just kidnap the men they wanted, cut them to establish their claim, and rape them. We are civilized now. A proper woman gets permission from the boy’s clan head, first.”

  I set my jaw. “No one’s going to do anything to you that you don’t want.” The air rang with my words. I was only a little godling; I couldn’t change the universe by word alone. But I could mean it, and Eino felt that. He blinked and looked at me as if finally noticing I was there, though he’d been talking to me all along. This time his smile was not as sad, and more genuine.

  “I’m glad I have you for a friend, Shill,” he said, gently. “At least what you want from me is something I’m willing to give.” He reached for me, perhaps to pet my hair, but I flinched away from the blood on his finger, and he blinked. “… Sorry.” He put his hand back in his lap.

  I was just proud of myself for not running away this time. I drew up my knees, wrapped my arms around them. “What do you want to do?” I asked. “Are you going to marry Lumyn, or Mikna?”

  His voice hardened and his smile faded. “Not you, too, Shill.”

  I shrugged, awkwardly. “I don’t care which. I just want to understand how you think about it.”

  “Ah. Your quest for understanding.” Abruptly he got up, pacing with the knife i
n his hand. “What I think is that I don’t want to think about this, Shill. I think there are other problems in the world, other things I could be worrying about, besides who gets to slice me up and ride me! Like how to help you.” He stopped, glaring at me. “I want to be your enulai. But I don’t know my own magic. And you just saw—I haven’t been trained in how to be careful around gods! You should choose Mikna; at least she won’t kill you by accident.”

  I wanted to say, I don’t want Mikna, but he was right; she was a better enulai. Maybe only because she’d been trained and he hadn’t, but I didn’t know how to make anyone train him. “She isn’t terrible,” I said, grudgingly.

  Eino laughed, pacing again. “No, she isn’t. I’d probably fall in love with either of them if I had half a moment to think about it. But no one will give me that moment, and all I can think about is how unfair all this is. If I’d just been born with the right stuff between my legs…” He shook his head.

  I knew how that felt, kind of. “I was supposed to be different, too,” I said, shifting to sit cross-legged. “Everybody thought I would be the new Trickster when I was born. But I’m not. I even thought I could make myself be the Trickster, but none of that has worked. I’m still just me.”

  Eino stopped again, his back to me this time. It was sunset now, and he stood stock-still in the slanting red light; it made me think of Papa Tempa. “What do you intend to do about that?”

  “Do?” I considered, then finally shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t be what everyone wanted me to be. I can’t even be what I want to be. I’m going to have to find a way to live with what I am, I guess.” As soon as I figured that out.

  “And if you can’t? Live with it, I mean.”

  I had never thought of that. “I don’t know. I guess… if I really want to, I can always go to Mama—um, Yeine, that is. Or, or find a demon. When gods want to die, that’s what they have to do.”

  “Poor creatures.” It sounded like a joke, the way Eino said it, but it didn’t seem very funny. “That you must rely on someone else for the privilege of taking your own life.”

  I shrugged a little, not really liking the conversation anymore. “Yeine calls mortality a gift. I think it’s scary, but when you put it that way, maybe it is.”

  “Yes.” Eino fell silent. I watched him, and worried. He was so still, just like Papa. But mortals are not meant to be like Itempas. They’re supposed to bend; if they get too much like him, they break.

  I could hear some noise downstairs in the house, but I’d sort of pushed it away as unimportant. A moment later, though, I heard footsteps on the stairs that led up to the roof, and then Arolu opened the door. He was breathing hard, his handsome face stark with worry. “Eino,” he said, then seemed to run out of things to say. A moment later, however, he was pushed forward and out of the doorway, and three women in black uniforms stepped out onto the rooftop with Fahno in tow looking worried.

  “Eino mau Tehno?” This was one of the uniformed women. As weapons went she had only a knife strapped across the small of her back, but her hand was on the hilt of this. “You are summoned. The Council would like a word with you.”

  “Would they?” asked Eino, as I got to my feet. He didn’t sound alarmed, and suddenly he was smiling. It was a strange smile. “Good. I’d like to talk to them, too.”

  I did not know this at the time, but later I showed my older siblings a memory of this smile, and they said it was a lot like Sieh’s had been, when he was up to something scary.

  The women in the uniforms took Eino back to the place I’d visited on my first day in the mortal realm: the Raringa, a great domed building where the Warriors’ Council held court and decided the fate of the Darre.

  I tried to stay with Eino, because I did not know what was going on but it seemed to be bad. Fahno made me walk with her and Arolu instead, though, because—she said—it would make the Council more prejudiced against Eino if I misbehaved. I wasn’t sure if I believed her, but I stayed quiet and near her anyway, just in case. Mikna and Lumyn were there at the Raringa, too, arriving when we did; Lumyn glanced at us but moved to the other side of a gathering knot of women moving into the chamber, while Mikna came over and nodded briskly to Fahno, her jaw set and tight. She saw me and nodded again. Even Ia was there, appearing quietly beside us as we claimed a spot amid the gathering crowd of onlookers.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered to him. A lot of people looked at us; I’d been too loud again.

  “I don’t know,” he said, frowning slightly. That made me worry more, and I was already worried lots. I didn’t like the look on Ia’s face. I didn’t like that Eino had said And if you can’t? Live with it.

  I especially didn’t like that I knew Eino still had Lumyn’s knife, hidden somewhere in his robes.

  At the door of the Council chamber the uniformed women tried to put shackles on Eino. I bared my teeth and made them go away. They looked at him like he had done it. He smiled and said, “There’s no need for that, is there?” And they did not try to put shackles on him again.

  Fahno looked at me very hard and suspiciously! But she did not know for sure, and that was what mattered. I had learned a lot from Eino.

  Now Eino knelt at the center of a wide circle of some fifty or sixty old women seated on cushions, and one much younger woman who sat on an elevated stool facing him. He was quiet and still, his eyes downcast, his robes a swirl of bright burgundy-emerald jewel tones around him; the women were stark and restless in black and gray, murmuring to one another and glaring over pursed lips and sniffing noses. I didn’t like any of them.

  But it was Fahno who made a rumbly sound that made me think of stormclouds, and Fahno who pushed me aside so she could stalk forward and stand in front of Eino, glaring back at the women around her.

  “This is a full Council,” she said. Her voice was really quiet; that was how everyone could tell just how mad she was. “Is there some reason why I was not informed of this meeting?”

  The young woman took a deep breath; I didn’t blame her. “You’re too close to the situation, Fahno-enulai. You would’ve had to recuse yourself in any case, so we bypassed that step for efficiency’s sake.”

  “I would’ve appreciated the chance to recuse myself,” she said, glowering, “especially as then you would’ve had to tell me what the hells this is all about.”

  “This isn’t about you, Fahno,” said one of the other women, from the far side of the circle.

  “Not about me?” Fahno’s voice was big and wide, like she was; when she used it fully, it almost filled the domed chamber. Several of the women nearest her flinched. “You drag my grandson here, on the eve of his marriage, and this has nothing to do with me?”

  Another woman leaned forward, looking as angry as Fahno. “If you want us to consider you, Fahno—and your permissiveness, your indulgence, how this boy’s wildness is due to your incompetence as a clan matriarch, we certainly will—”

  “If I may,” said Eino, from where he knelt behind Fahno. He said it lightly, in a pleasant tone, but his voice was just as deep and resonant as Fahno’s; everyone started and turned to him, Fahno included. He smiled and ducked his eyes demurely. “If I may, great warriors, Kitke-ennu, my beba. I would like to speak for myself.”

  “This isn’t the time,” Fahno snapped.

  “There will be no better, Beba. Please.”

  She stared at him; he stared back. For the first time I realized they had the same eyes, just as deepwater black and implacable, even though Eino’s were lined with kohl and silver-lidded and Fahno’s were deep-set and ringed from worry. She shook her head just a little, and I almost heard the speech-without-words between them! Or maybe I imagined it? I won’t be able to protect you, she said, I thought.

  I’ll protect myself, he said back, and I shivered all over without knowing why. But at the end of the exchange, Fahno sighed and stepped aside. She lingered in the circle, though, her arms folded, making clear by her presence that Eino was not without his su
pporters.

  I pushed forward through the crowd, too, before Mikna could grab me, and I took Fahno’s hand. She glanced down at me in surprise, and some of the old women gave me bad looks. I did not give them bad looks back! I was being very mature.

  “Please,” said Eino. He spoke quietly now, but his back was very straight, his hands very flat in his lap. “May I know why I have been brought here?”

  The young woman seemed to consider whether to answer. “There has been an accusation,” she said, finally—and then she eyed Fahno. “One that we have already dismissed as groundless, mind you. It was unofficial in any case, made by Luud mau Esuum, a young unproven man of one of the merchant clans. We are aware that young men can be… excitable.”

  Many of the women in the circle nodded, some indulgently, some maliciously. Eino bore it all without a twitch and said, “And what was the nature of the accusation, Kitke-ennu, if I—or my clan matriarch—may know?”

  “Sedition.” Kitke-ennu said this flatly, but there was a rustle around the chamber again—not amid the ring of Council-women this time, but the watching crowd, most of whom apparently hadn’t known. Kitke scowled. “But we have dismissed it out of respect for Fahno-enulai, who has served Darr well in all her years.”

  “Sedition!” Eino laughed then, stilling the murmurs; women stared at him, shocked. He shook his head to himself. “Oh, poor Luud. He’d have done better to accuse me of luring him into iniquity; you would have believed that. What did you do to him, to scare him so badly that he told the truth?”

  Fahno flinched. Arolu gasped and put his sleeve to his mouth. Several women in the circle tried to speak at once; Kitke quickly held up a hand and leaned forward, her eyes narrowing. “Are you saying the charge is true?”

  “That depends on what you think of as sedition.” Eino shrugged, no longer demure or serene. The look on his face was openly contemptuous now; he looked around at the Warriors’ Council the same way Ia had looked at me on that first day, or Zhakkarn on the second—like he knew they were beneath him. He lifted his chin, as if to emphasize this. “I believe the Darre are stronger as a whole people, not with half of our kind reduced to possessions and treated like children. I act in accordance with this belief. Is that sedition?”